Expired developer certificates prevented apps from starting on macOS

Expired developer certificates prevented several macOS apps from launching this weekend. Among them was the popular password manager 1Password. The problem can be solved by manually updating the applications.

Other affected apps include Soulver and PDFPen, MacRumors writes. Users face the issue if they downloaded the apps outside of the App Store directly from the developer’s site. These programs come with a developer certificate to prove that they are legitimate software that has not been modified. In the past, the expiration of such a certificate had no consequences, but a change by Apple has changed that.

According to MacRumors, the cause lies with provisioning profiles, which show which system functions an app is allowed to perform. These were introduced in macOS Sierra. This profile also uses the developer certificate and will stop working if it expires. The apps that are experiencing the problems have in common, according to MacRumors, that they all use the iCloud permissions in their profile.

1Password developer AgileBits says in a blog post that a manual update to version 6.5.5 will fix the issue. Version 2.6.1 solves the problems for Soulver and also for PDFPen there is a new version.